India Invites Pakistani, Chinese Foreign Ministers to SCO Meeting in May
A paramilitary force soldier walks across Rajpath that was renamed Kartavya Path in New Delhi, Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022.
InternationalIndiaAfricaMOSCOW (Sputnik)- India has extended invitations to all members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), including Pakistan and China, for the forthcoming meeting of SCO foreign ministers in Goa on May 4-5, the local newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing sources. India took on the 2022 chairmanship in the SCO in September and will hold key minister-level meetings and a summit this year. “So far there is no confirmation from the Pakistani side whether foreign minister Bilawal [Bhutto] will attend the meeting or not,” one source was quoted as saying by the media. The SCO is an international organization founded by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia and Uzbekistan in 2001. In 2017, India and Pakistan were admitted to the organization. India and China have thousands of square miles of disputed borderlands between them, from the Ladakh region, which is triangulated with Pakistan’s Kashmir claims, all the way to Arunachal Pradesh to the east of Bhutan. Border conflicts are a permanent fixture of India-China relations, as the countries do not have a marked border but rather the Line of Actual Control, created after the 1962 border war between the nations. India and Pakistan have also fought several wars over Kashmir since gaining independence in 1947. However, their ties hit rock bottom in 2019 after the Indian government stripped the Jammu and Kashmir state of its special status and broke it up into two union territories. India controls the southern part of the Kashmir region, while Pakistan and China hold its northwestern and northeastern parts, respectively.